


Something Wicked This Way Comes

by bahorel



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Boy Scout AU, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-16
Updated: 2014-08-05
Packaged: 2018-02-09 03:35:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1967460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bahorel/pseuds/bahorel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dexter Grif, reluctant Boy Scout, questions the unnecessary and gratuitous violence constantly taking place in the small New England town of Blood Gulch. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, but is this a mystery he really wants to get to the bottom of?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Sunrise over the Catskills in the late spring was a quietly transcendent affair in birdsong, stealing over the terrestrial spine in waves of pale and unassuming gold which without either warning or suddenness would be followed by waves of rose capped in crimson and the first streaks of robin’s egg blue. Dexter Grif wished with all his heart that he could not be awake to see it. The light hurt his eyes and the consciousness hurt his soul. As soon as they had been given the word to move, he had dropped to one knee and decided to untie the laces on his scuffed Adidas sneakers (not appropriate hiking footwear, according to Sarge and Grif’s own aching ankles) in order to tie them again. Posed on the outcropping like Atlas holding the world on his slim boy-man’s shoulders, Grif proceeded to fall asleep. His fingers ceased work slowly and fell comatose like slow-motion puppets with their strings cut; his eyelashes came to rest on his cheeks and his cheek on his knee.

A kick to the ribs brought him swiftly to his feet again. “Wake up, asshole! We’re getting left behind again.” Excellent. Eagle Scout Simmons, dick extraordinaire. Grif scowled at him and stomped up the trail after the rest of the troop, huffing with contempt. This freckled string bean thought he could order Grif around just because he was six inches taller, seventy-six days older, and had ninety-three merit badges (including the stamp collecting badge) at age seventeen, but Grif knew that by twenty-seven he’d probably end up the personal fuckboy of some self-important corporate lawyer or CEO.

As they wound up the beaten path through the trees, Grif did some thinking. His thinking mostly consisted of repetitive profanity. His lungs ached, his throat constricted, his calves burned and his skin became slick with sweat. His scope of vision had been reduced to the heels of Simmons’ bright red state-of-the-art hiking boots, following their example, one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other, occasionally stumbling and occasionally slowing but never stopping— until Grif smacked straight into Simmons’ back and found the rest of their troop stock-still at the edge of the world. The other two boys stood sickeningly close to the edge of the sloped outcropping, fearlessly testing gravity; Sarge sat with his legs dangling in open space. Two hundred feet of open space were there to cushion them should they fall.

“You ever wonder why we’re here?” Simmons asked. Grif looked at him quickly, but he was staring out over the horizon with his thumbs hooked in the straps of his backpack and brows furrowed.

“It’s one of life’s great mysteries, isn’t it? Why are we here?” He shielded his eyes with one hand and squinted out at the miles of rolling tree and meadow spread beneath them in verdant rampancy. No roads here. The clouds on the edge of the horizon were full of sieves through which liquid gold the weight of light spilled through, looked like a painting on the ceiling of some cathedral. “Are we the product of— some cosmic coincidence, or is there really a God watching everything, with a plan for us and stuff? I don’t know, man, but it keeps me up at night.”

They were silent together, under the glory of the rising sun to which they were microscopic and insignificant. Then: “ _What?_ I mean why are we up here, on this mountain.”

“Oh.” Grif’s cheeks began to burn. “Wh... I... Yeah.”

“What was all that stuff about God?”

“Uh? Hm? Nothing.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“Nah.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“But seriously, why are we here? We’ve already climbed Slide half a dozen times. Don’t you think it’s time for Sarge to take us on a month-long trip to the Adirondacks or something?” He clasped his hands under his chin and gazed at their troop leader with starry eyes.

“God fucking forbid we get sent on a month-long trip to the Adirondacks. If you suggest it to him, I _will_ strangle you.” Grif side-eyed Simmons menacingly. He wasn’t messing around. Twenty minutes on an incline had Grif trying to sell his soul to the Devil in order to not be in this situation. (The Devil wasn’t interested.) A month in the Adirondacks? A _week_ in the Adirondacks would end with his shriveled, rotting corpse feeding the crows, and those crows would become dehydrated just by tasting him.

But Simmons had a strange, dreamy look of adulation on his face and was already striding over to Sarge to suggest the trip, no doubt believing it would be a real feather in his cap. Grif ate a granola bar and eavesdropped with a mixture of dread and contempt. Their troop leader was a grizzled Army Vet from down South with a thick accent and an excessively martial attitude towards the Boy Scouts. He often ordered Grif to drop and give him twenty, which Grif never did, on grounds that a) he never asked any of the other boys to do push-ups, and b) Grif could not do a push-up. Not a single one. This was a travesty in Sarge’s professional opinion, and in order to make up for Grif’s twin sins of insubordination and lack of physical fitness, he engaged in regular and invigorating verbal abuse.

Now, to Grif’s mounting horror, Sarge was nodding appreciatively at the Adirondack proposal. Simmons leaned over him with a nervous sycophantic smile, all “Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir.” It was nauseating. Taking notes at Sarge’s side was a bushy-tailed, bright-faced child of fifteen who was two days in the troop and already Grif’s least favorite person, on account of his constant optimism and suspiciously consistent penchant for “unintentional” innuendo. Telling Franklin Delano Donut where he could shove it was always ruined by the knowledge that he wanted to shove it there.

 _“¿Usted va a terminar esa barra de granola?”_ At some point during his intense brooding session, the foreign exchange student had snuck up on him. Lopez was Sarge’s nephew visiting indefinitely from Nicaragua, and after seven months on American soil he did not appear to speak a word of English—which didn’t stop anyone in the troop from responding to him anyway.

“Yeah,” Grif agreed gloomily. “We are royally fucked.” He had a feeling it was going to be a long day.

 

***

It did turn out to be a long day, but not for the reasons he expected.

Red Troop came to a straight drop of ten feet or so in the middle of the path, and Sarge tossed his backpack down without preamble and climbed down afterwards. “He’s surprisingly nimble for an old guy,” Grif commented. Simmons gave him a dirty look.

They began to pass their backpacks down the line to Donut, who had one hand and one foot wedged in a crack in the rock face and used his free hand to hand the packs down to Sarge. Each time he accepted another backpack, the muscles in his bronze arms swelled to the size of footballs. He cheerfully informed everyone that he did not mind handling large packages. Grif turned away in disgust as Simmons turned bright red and whispered to everyone in earshot: “Did you hear that? Did you hear what he just said? That had to have been on purpose. Tell me you heard that.”

Once all the packs had made it to the other side, the scouts began to climb down one by one. Grif awaited his turn in the back of the line with some anxiety. He wasn’t a particularly agile boy, and being last everyone would be watching his ungainly descent, which would almost certainly end in him falling on his ass.  
However, before he could make his big debut onto the stage of shame, company arrived. They were heralded by the echo of boots on dry leaves and sticks and an off-key rendition of the Camptown Races song:

 

 

Never gonna see your friends again  
Doo dah, doo dah  
Counselors never loved you  
Doo dah doo dah day.  
Gonna cry all night, gonna cry all day  
Never comin’ back to camp no more  
Doo dah, doo dah day.

Into the clearing burst Blue Troop, led by the rosy-cheeked, towering visage of Butch Flowers, Sarge’s greatest enemy. Their song broke off in bits and pieces until it was just local idiot Caboose belting out “doo dah, doo dah day,” and then local asshole Church jabbed him in the ribs and there was silence. They faced off warily, sizing one another up and tightening the straps of their backpacks in preparation for fight or flight. Simmons, who had reached ground just seconds before the dramatic entrance, began to edge towards his resting pack.

“What in Sam Hell is this?” Sarge demanded finally.

“We’re on a bonding trip!” Flowers responded brightly. “I thought I’d take the boys out for a little nine-day hike, smell the roses, tell campfire stories, remind ‘em that even at this trying age they can find friends in one another.” Behind him, Church made a gagging face and Caboose’s eyes flew wide with shock. He threw his arms around Church’s waist and attempted to give him the Heimlich maneuver.

“Well, you can’t pass through here,” Sarge asserted firmly, and the hairs on the back of Grif’s neck stood up. Church jerked away from Caboose, looking even paler than usual, and bent down to scoop up a rock. Tucker was twirling a tree branch in an idly menacing manner behind his leader’s innocent and nonplussed back. Even Donut was quietly collecting stones in the hem of his t-shirt, exposing his tan flat belly in a flattering manner.

“Simmons,” Grif hissed. He crept to the edge of the rock face as Flowers tried to reason with their completely unreasonable scout leader. The drop looked even more threatening than before. At ten feet, he could break an ankle! Especially in these shoes. Boy, did he regret wearing sneakers. _“Simmons!”_

 _"What?”_ He whirled around, glaring at Grif. “What are you still doing up there? Get down here.”

“Help me!”

“It’s, like, ten feet. You could jump that.” They traded meaningful glances for several seconds before Simmons gave in with a melodramatic sigh. He pointed to a bend in the wide crack that ran down the rock face. “Come down on your stomach and put your foot here.”

Since he was wiggling down the mountain on his stomach at the time, Grif never could be sure who cast the first stone, but within seconds there were pebbles whizzing through the air way over the speed limit, egged on by boyish whoops and Sarge’s completely inappropriate order to “Give ‘em hell!”

“Hurry!” Simmons yelled, and yanked Grif’s foot down, wedging it into the crevice. “You’re making yourself a target!”

“This is fucking crazy,” Grif cried, fumbling at handholds with numb fingers. “What are we _doing?”_

“Fighting the Blues!” Simmons answered, as if that were any kind of real answer. _Why_ were they fighting the Blues? Who _cared_ if they passed through here? Red Troop did not own this pass, and right now all Grif wanted to keep ownership of was his ass. He jammed his hands into the rock and tried to step down, but found that his sneaker was wedged in too tightly and began to wail in fear.

Meanwhile, in the background, accompanied by a symphony of pained yelps and bruising _thwacks:_

“Get down, men! Hold a steady suppressing fire!”

“Caboose, what the _fuck?_ I’m on your team! What did you just _do_ to me?”

“I think I’m going to pass out...”

“If everyone could just put down their weapons, maybe we can talk about this. I think we said a lot of hurtful things today that we didn’t mean. Remember, sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can never hurt you. Let’s get our feelings out there in the open instead of sticks and stones.”

“How’s it feel to get fucked in the ass by Blue Troop, huh? Bow chicka wow wow! Wait...”

“I’m sorry, Church! Hold on, I think the rock got stuck in your butt. Let me get it out. Come out, come out, little rock.”

_“Lo que está sucediendo?”_

_“Don’t touch me!_ Ow, fuck!”

“This is hardly the time for battlefield humor, Lopez! But ha ha!”

A projectile hit Grif in the elbow, and a funny shock ran down his arm. His fingers lost all feeling and he tumbled from the rock face, ripping his shoe out of the crevice in the process. He was speechless with shock and assured of a terrible fate, until he slammed into something soft and both he and Simmons went crashing to the ground. Or, rather, Simmons went crashing to the ground and a dazed but relieved Grif remained dirt-free on top of him, watching deadly missiles sail over his head.

The fight could not end until Sarge was looking the other way, metaphorically. Literally, that meant Sarge was momentarily stunned by a flying branch to the head. It looked like a win for Blue Troop, but one couldn’t be quite sure, given that there were wounded on both sides. (In truth, Grif was relieved that they had lost, because on their way down the mountain later he found a tree with a rock buried several inches deep in it and had Donut’s famous arm actually found a target Grif thought he probably would have been sick.) So Tucker put down his weapons (what a joke) and began to edge past Red Troop, half of which was unconscious. Flowers followed, still chatting incessantly about the need for constructive criticism and civil communication, and Caboose brought up the rear with Church slung over his shoulder and still whining. Between Flowers and Caboose was a blue scout Grif had never seen before: black baseball cap, blonde ponytail, and then they bypassed Tucker and bounded up the cliff face and were gone.

“Was that a _girl?”_ he asked, getting to his feet and extending a hand down to Simmons, who waved him off and rolled over, groaning. Sarge sat up, dazed, and lamented the mysterious disappearance of the Blue infidels.

 _“Yo creo que está muerto,”_ Lopez remarked coolly, pushing a lock of hair back from Donut’s forehead. His fingers came away bloody. “Adios, Donut.”

“Why are you saying hello to Donut?” Sarge wanted to know. “Did you get hit in the head too, Lopez? Anyway, he’s unconscious, he can’t hear you.”

“We should probably get him to a hospital,” Grif said, examining his elbow. There was an open gash there about the size of a quarter and deeper than he wanted to know, and he removed his neckerchief and pressed it to the throbbing wound so that he would feel like he had done something about it. “He could have a concussion. Or a brain hemorrhage. That would look really bad in court, and it’ll probably end up being my fault somehow.”

_“O el podría estar muerto.”_

“Of course it’s your fault!” Sarge barked. “What were you doing this whole time, you sissy? Wetting your pants? If you’d sacked up and thrown a few rocks like Lopez and Donut here, you might have gotten a kill for yourself!”

“A _kill? Sarge, they’re seventeen-year-old Boy Scouts! Boy Scouts don’t kill each other! We’re not in the army! And if we _were_ in the army, we would be in the _same_ army, so we _still_ wouldn’t kill each other!” His voice had ascended to new decibels of squeaky outrage._

“I don’t mean an actual kill, soldier, but there will be an actual kill around here if you don’t pick Donut up and carry him down to the campsite for medevac right this instant!”

 _“Me?_ Why do _I_ have to carry him?”

“Because you’re fat and it’ll do you some good to get a little exercise!”

“Okay, first of all, my doctor says my BMI is in the fifty-fifth percentile—“

A fully-recovered Simmons bounced to his feet and snapped to attention. “I’ll carry Donut down the mountain, sir!”

Twenty minutes later, they were traipsing down the mountain in exhausted silence, taking turns dragging Donut behind them on a tarp. Sarge had already radioed for an ambulance to meet them by the park ranger’s hut. He appeared at last to be truly concerned for Donut, and everyone was subdued but Lopez, who always wore the same expression of contemptuous dissatisfaction and saw no reason to change that for this utterly contemptible and dissatisfying situation. It was Simmons’ turn to drag Donut again, and Lopez strode ahead of him with an enviable long-legged gait. Grif, who had short legs and was sensitive about it, lagged behind as per usual. He was still nursing the gaping wound in his elbow. Back at the clearing they had poured hydrogen peroxide over any and all cuts and scrapes, including Donut’s head wound, and placed appropriate-sized band-aids over the more serious injuries—once again, including Donut’s head wound. His temple had swollen to the size of a quail egg and was mottled purple and red beneath the band-aid. Blue spiderweb veins laced the pale membrane of his eyelids, which were unnaturally still, and Grif could not stop thinking about the girl.

He was almost certain now that she had been a girl, and not just a boy with a ponytail. What a girl was doing in a Boy Scout troop he could not say, but he remembered now seeing glimpses of her in the trees, upside down lying on top of Simmons and trying to catch his breath. She was stealthy, all right, and dressed in camouflage like she was a SWAT team summer intern and not a seventeen-year-old girl hanging around with a bunch of Boy Scouts. Who did she think she was, the Sacagawea to their hopeless Lewis and Clark? That couldn’t possibly be allowed, but then again, nothing in Blood Gulch or the surrounding areas ever seemed to make sense.

They reached the campgrounds in a couple of hours and left Donut under Lopez’s indifferent gaze while they went off to their respective businesses: Sarge to speak with the park ranger, and Grif and Simmons to use a real bathroom for the first time in two days. Afterwards they stood at the sinks in the dim light that filtered in through a couple of cobwebbed skylights, and Simmons scrubbed his face of the dirt and sweat until his skin was pink and raw but clean. Grif followed suit in a less thorough manner, emulating the flawlessly ineffective splash usually featured in Proactiv commercials.

“Hey, you have freckles again,” Grif commented, and pinched Simmons’ newly tanned cheeks. “There they are! Thought they were gone, but I guess it was just a layer of grime.” Simmons swatted his hand away and peered in the mirror as though his freckles, which had been present companions nearly all his life, were a new concern. Grif leaned a hip against the lip of the sink and watched him fret over his appearance in the mirror for a minute, then peeled back the stained band-aid on his elbow and sucked a breath in through his teeth. Blood had clotted and crusted in the opening in an attempt to seal off the breach, but it still seeped out around the edges. Gross. He stuck the band-aid back on. No one should have to see that shit.

Once Donut had been loaded into the ambulance and sent off with an emotional hankie wave and nose blow from Sarge, Red Troop was off again. Grif had made a desperate attempt to hitch a ride back to civilization in the back of the ambulance, but only relatives were permitted and Grif’s plan to pose as Donut’s adopted cousin was foiled when Sarge dragged him away by the back of his collar. Now he dragged his feet up the trail, shoulders hunched under the weight of his pack, occasionally raising a hand to bat lazily at the mosquitoes which sought him hungrily. He was gloomy and quiet all the way up to Giant’s Peak—quiet for Grif, that was, which meant he spent the whole time muttering breathlessly to himself while Lopez shot him increasingly venomous looks and Sarge explained bullshit survival trivia to Simmons’ absolutely disproportionate delight.

Without Donut’s irritatingly cheerful presence and knack for decorating, their campsite was set up in sullen disarray. As soon as dinner was over, Lopez retreated into his tent with a characteristically hilarious one-liner— _“Si cabrones permanecer despierta toda la noche jugando Verdad o Reto de nuevo, te mataré.”_ Even Grif allowed a small snort to escape him. None of them had any idea what Lopez had just said.

The other two boys climbed into their own tent and laid their sleeping bags down side by side. Their eyelids were already heavy with sleep when they rested their chins on their arms to watch the glow fade from their campfire. “Goodnight, boys,” said Sarge, silhouetted against the moon in the triangular opening of their tent. “Don’t let the bats bite.”

“The _what?”_ Grif nearly ripped his sleeping bag in half scrambling to his knees. Bats were no joke. They were vicious, blood-sucking monsters with the snouts of pigs and the fangs of the Devil. They also carried rabies. Grif did not want rabies. He had known someone with rabies once, and that guy had been shot by his neighbor, foaming at the mouth and yelling gibberish.

“If you don’t zip that tent flap up and zip your mouth shut in the next thirty seconds, you’re going to regret it,” Simmons warned him in a voice muffled by the sleeping bag pulled over his face.

Sarge sauntered away, chortling, to his own 15’x15’ heavy-duty tent complete with canopy and an inflatable mattress. It was unclear how he carried all those things, but Grif envied him. Simmons was too tall to lie straight in the tent, and so he slept curled up with his knees digging into Grif’s back until, inevitably in the middle of the night, Grif sat up cursing him to hell and back and rolled him over so that their backs were pressed against one another.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Appendix A: Spanish Translations
> 
> For those of you who didn't care or could not translate Lopez's speech while reading, here are the English translations.
> 
> “¿Usted va a terminar esa barra de granola?” - "Are you going to finish that granola bar?"
> 
> “Lo que está sucediendo?” - "What is happening?"
> 
> "Yo creo que está muerto. Adios, Donut." - "I think he's dead. Goodbye, Donut."
> 
> “O el podría estar muerto.” - "Or he could be dead."
> 
> “Si cabrones permanecer despierta toda la noche jugando Verdad o Reto de nuevo, te mataré.” - "If you bastards stay up all night playing Truth or Dare again, I'll kill you."


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Lopez goes missing.

Some eleven hours later, as they picked their way through an ankle-breaking ravine with their heads down, Grif became aware of something off-beat. It was like mounting a fever that made all the atoms in your head vibrate .00002 times as fast as they were before, and then .00002 times as fast as that, until your whole head was heavy with ping-pong kinetic energy and you wondered why you hadn’t noticed before how hot your skin was as you rested your cheek on the cold porcelain toilet seat and tried not to upchuck your lunch. Grif raised his head and looked behind him. He looked in front of him. He looked to the left, to the right, and up just for the sake of thoroughness. Then he reached out and grabbed the strap of Simmons’ backpack, jerking him to a stop and pulling a yelp of outrage out of him.

“What the hell is going on back there?” Sarge demanded. He did an about-face and snapped his brows together to glare down at them (down at Grif, that was; Simmons had surpassed Sarge in height at age fourteen). Simmons whined an apology; Sarge demanded an explanation; the wheels turned. Now the last echoes of their footsteps had died away, and Grif was completely sure. He raised a hand to quell the angry ramblings of his comrades, and then when that failed yelled over them:

_“Where is Lopez?”_

And thus a silence descended, which left Grif feeling inappropriately satisfied.

They began to backtrack, shouting Lopez’s name along with a few choice swear words. After ten minutes of scaring the birds from the trees and being scared by the squirrels (at one juncture Grif was so startled by the furry rodent that he screamed and jumped backwards, trodding on Simmons’ toes and evincing a scream from _him),_ they stopped to put their heads together about the problem.

“Blue Troop must have kidnapped him,” Sarge announced definitively.

“Um, sir...” Simmons raised one finger in uncertain protest while Grif spluttered incoherently with shock and disbelief. “That seems unlikely, given that they were... going the other way...” But their scout leader was having none of it. He began to march up and down the bank of the ravine, slandering Blue Troop with an enviable regional vocabulary. Grif sat down on a rock and broke open the snack pack of Oreos he had been saving for desperate times. He was asleep in moments, stretched out in the dappled sunlight with his back resting against the wall of the ravine and the bill of his baseball cap pulled down low over his eyes, half an Oreo still wedged in his cheek.

He dreamed about mines.

Last weekend, he and Simmons had spent eighteen consecutive hours in a Minecraft LAN party. That was the seed of it, he was sure. They had stretched out on Simmons’ bed side by side on their stomachs and mined until their eyes blurred and their thumbs ached and their heads came to rest on their keyboards in fitful five-second naps. The low-res surreality became reality, and that was how he knew he was in a mine as he dreamt. The ceiling was low and claustrophobic with the exception of some caverns so deep and dark that the highest and lowest reaches were invisible abysses; his insides and his outsides were coated delicately with stone dust that rose in a cloud at every step. Cold air and the smell of sulfur carressed his cheeks with dead, sour fingers. He descended not into the bowels of the earth but, he felt intuitively at the time (and ridiculously, afterward) the unseen guts of heaven. Jagged holes in the wall gaped at him with broken teeth and dumb tongues, inviting him in. He nervously declined, although the temptation to see what secrets they hid in the lining of their cheeks was strong.

At the bottom of the stairs was a weird Coke-bottle figure silhouetted in the dimness. As he neared it, squinting, Grif began to recognize a familiar jawline, an uncomfortable hipshot stance with one hand propped on the hip and the other resting awkwardly on the upper thigh. It was Sandra Bullock in an evening dress, guarding the gate. This, too, was explicable later: his sister had been watching Miss Congeniality in the living room when he left the house two days ago. She wasn’t looking so congenial now, though. In fact, she was looking downright malicious.

Gory, pornographic images slammed into and out of his vision like single slides on a movie reel. Bodies in the mine shaft, fingers entwined sinking nails into skin to draw half-crescents of blood, kicking the ankles out from under each other and collapsing to the ground to rub coal dust in their wounds—all in the form of scrapbook images, like an end-of-camp montage. “No, Sandra Bullock,” he begged. “I don’t want to be a prophet. Let me go!”

A hearty smack upside the head brought him back to life. He jerked upright, jammed his elbow into the rock behind him, and glared up at Simmons. “You asshole,” he accused, still operating in dream-time, “she was _just_ about to say something.”

 _“Who_ was just about to say something?”

“Sandra Bullock!”

Another hearty smack upside the head. “Stop daydreaming about women old enough to be your mother, you Oedipal piece of shit.”

“Did you say _edible,_ because—“ His request for another snack was interrupted punctually by Sarge.

“Grif,” he said, “you are going to climb that there tree and scout for the Blues.”

“You mean for Lopez,” Simmons corrected.

“I mean for the Blues, damn it! They’ve got Lopez. Haven’t you been listenin’? It’s all part of their master plan. They’ve kidnapped Lopez in order to use him against us! They won’t be keeping him in plain sight. That’s why we have to look for them instead. And by ‘we’ I mean Grif.”

Grif thought he might be sick, but since there was no way that would get him off the hook, he swallowed his bile and looked away from the dizzying upper reaches of the birch tree Sarge had chosen to be his deathbed. It was only about as thick around as two of his armspans, and the branches were few and far between. The smallest breeze set the leaves turning their heads to whisper madly in one another’s ears. He could breathe on them and they’d dump him onto the ground.

“Well, go on,” Sarge prompted. Casting him a deeply bitter look, Grif set his pack down, kicked his shoes off, and obeyed. Mistake number one. He walked bandy-legged and swaggering up to the tree, spat on both his hands and rubbed them together, looked his foe up and down. No big, no big. If he kept his eyes front, it would just be him and the trunk bumping uglies. He’d cling to that bark like a desperate ex playing Celine Dion’s _My Heart Will Go On_ outside the window of someone who’s already over it.

Simmons had to give him a boost up to the first branch. He was out of breath by the time he gained his footing back enough to stand up. The yawning space below him almost made him sit back down again. “I’m going to go out on a _limb_ here and say that neither of you bastards will weep when I fall and break my neck.”

“It’s a seven foot drop,” Simmons pointed out. “It would take a lot of skill just to break an ankle.” Knowing that he was very skilled, Grif refused to be reassured. Nonetheless, he hauled himself up onto the next branch, scrabbling for purchase with sweaty hands and wishing he had a set of nice, long fingernails like Donut’s or his sister’s. His ascent was slow and arduous. The gash on his arm where some bastard Blue Scout had tried to break his funny bone tore open every time he stretched his arms out shoulder to fingertips to reach the next handhold, and his elbows and knees were scraped clean. Nonetheless, he was making progress. It was a strange feeling, to work hard at something he thought he couldn’t do and begin to succeed. Could it be that he actually liked this?

Nope. He straightened up, hugging the tree, and looked down. Mistake number two. The forest floor was now nearly thirty feet below, definitely an ankle-breaking fall. Probably a neck-breaking one, too. His travelling companions were all but hidden behind a screen of leaves, and the little chunk of Simmons he could see peering up concernedly back at him was the size of a Lego man.

When he looked _up,_ he saw that the branches only grew sparser and thinner from here on out, and through them he could mistake number three and open sky. Some fifteen feet above him, a lone bird was silhouetted against a patch of blue shaped like Texas—his least favorite U.S. state. He was unsure what kind of bird it was. It looked like some kind of hawk or eagle. Maybe an osprey. Or a kestrel. That was about all the birds of prey he knew, and this was looking at him in a decidedly raptorlike fashion. It turned its weird head ninety degrees and fixed him in one cold golden eye.

Without looking away from it (it was as though he were hypnotized), he called for help in a voice that cracked halfway through and broke through the upper register. No answer. “Help!” he called again. “Simmons! Get me down from here! There’s a _bird!_ I saw _Birdemic._  I know how this story ends!” As if it knew that he was talking about it, the bird snapped its head forward again and shuffled its wings. Grif cringed away, prying one heavy, clammy hand from the tree trunk to cover his head. _“Simmons!”_

He thought he could hear them muttering to each other down on the forest floor, although his hearing couldn’t possibly be that sharp. (The bird, however, certainly could hear Sarge ordering Simmons to let Grif die from a convenient combination of raptor attack and gravity.) He grew nauseous as he waited, cheek pressed to the bark hard enough to leave indents, until at last Simmons yelled back: “Do you see Lopez, Grif? I mean, Blue Troop? If you don’t, you can just come down!”

“’Just come down’?” he repeated shrilly. _“’Just come down’?_ I’m stuck! I can’t come down! And no, I can’t see them, obviously, because there’s no way they doubled back to kidnap our foreign exchange student, and also there are all these goddamn fucking trees in the way. Why don’t _you_ come up here and have a look?”

A long silence. More arguing, probably. Grif lowered himself down carefully until he was sitting on the branch. His feet dangled a good three feet above the next foothold. “All right, just come down,” Simmons shouted, as if he hadn’t heard a single thing Grif just said.

A quick glance skywards showed the bird unmoved except for a slight tilt of the head to accommodate Grif’s new position. He moaned in fear and slid down the trunk, stretching his calves until his toes brushed the next level and he could release his ironclad grip. His hands were beginning to cramp.

“That’s right!” Simmons cheered. “One step at a time. You got it.”

“Shut _up,_ Simmons!” But in truth, the sound of another voice grounded him, and right now he was really missing the ground. He sucked in a breath, looked up, regretted it, looked down, regretted it more, and continued to climb down.

He was still fifteen feet above the ground when he picked up movement in his right peripheral, too big and slow to be a squirrel or a bird. In the last thirty minutes, he had settled into a (relatively) comforting routine descent which involved keeping his eyes forward and his ears closed to Sarge’s verbal abuse. This was all shattered by the emergence of the figure in his right peripheral, and he yelped and ducked behind the trunk, believing for one terrifying moment that he saw a monster bat, or just a monster. By the time he realized that this could not possibly be the case, it was gone.

“Sarge?” he called down, interrupting a forty-five minute long tirade on the detrimental effect of Twinkies and Twitter on today’s yout (forty-three minutes subtracting the two Simmons spent explaining the difference between a twink and a Twinkie). “I think I might’ve just seen a person.”

“Well, howdy doo! Ain’t that a miraculous feat! Simmons, Grif just saw a _person._ It turns out he’s not blind, he was just sleepwalking all day! Of course you saw a person, you idiot, this is the Catskills. Everybody and their grandmother comes hiking here. Was it a _blue_ person?”

“They weren’t blue _skinned,_ if that’s what you’re asking,” Grif answered, knowing full well that was not what Sarge was asking. “They might’ve been a Blue Scout. I couldn’t tell. It might have been the girl.”

“What girl? You know girls?”

“What? No! The girl who was with Blue Tr—I mean, yes, of course I know girls! I just don’t know _this_ girl. Oh, fuck you guys. Simmons, stop sniggering.”

“Are you _forgetting_ something, scout?”

“Sorry. Fuck you guys, sir.”

This insult to his scout leader would not go unpunished. He hung monkey-like from a branch, stretched his toes are far as they could go, and brushed the top of the next step. Carefully, oh so carefully, he relinquished his handholds and dropped.

Mistake number three! His feet slipped right off the tree limb and it caught him between the legs instead. A strangled groan took a cheese grater to his throat, and his eyes welled up instantly. Before he could so much as mourn the premature passing of all the children he could have had, however, the branch snapped. Grif returned to ground, screaming the whole way down.

“I’ll catch you!” Simmons shouted, holding his arms out and bending his knees slightly to take the incoming weight, which was the fourth mistake. Grif missed him by a foot. With a hard thump that was decidedly and relievingly not spine-shattering, he landed flat on his back and was forced to relinquish his oxygen supply for the next several seconds. Like a balloon with a hole in it, his lungs would not inflate, and when he sat up, sucking in air, his vision was immediately populated by spots in a variety of shapes and colors, solar circus variety pack rings.

“Grif? Grif! Sir, I think he’s concussed.”

“He certainly is confused, Simmons. He said there was a girl in Blue Troop! This is the _Boy_ Scouts. We don’t have girls!”

Through a myopic haze of frustration and oxygen deprivation, Grif saw Sarge’s grizzled jaw descending towards him, crowned with a squint and filled in with a scowl. He turned his face away and brought up one hand to shield his eyes from the sunlight reflecting off of Sarge’s impeccably shined necktie clip. “You’re right,” he acquiesced, still breathless but alive enough to maintain a subtly ironic tone. “There are no girls. In fact, I’ve never seen a girl. Are you sure they’re real, and not made up?”

“We should get out of here so we can report Lopez missing,” Simmons said, ignoring Grif entirely. “What if he’s dead? I don’t want to be responsible for carrying a corpse all the way back to civilization. Donut would complain about the stains in the van upholstery for weeks.”

As Grif recovered and began to check himself for scrapes and bruises, Sarge took his moment of silence for the potentially dead Lopez. He looked off into the trees with his haggard face lined in woe. Simmons stood by with hands clasped under his chin to admire his leader’s strength in the face of adversity.

When at last they set off again, it was with gloomy dispositions all around. Grif looked over his shoulder so often he began to get dizzy, but it was worth it to make sure the bird wasn’t following him. He was curious, again, about the figure in the woods. It could have been an innocent hiker, for sure, and yet... Was it possible that the Blue scouts had kidnapped Lopez to avenge their casualties (none) in the rock fight? Or to hold as a hostage in case of further altercations?

Sarge’s paranoia was poisoning him. He was attempting to regain his convictions when they emerged from the wild into the parking lot where Vic had promised their van would be waiting at three o’clock on Friday afternoon. It was now four o’clock on Friday afternoon, and there was no van in sight. There were, however, two sets of footprints in the mud leading up to a set of tire tracks, which led out of the parking lot onto the road.


End file.
